Our 14th season is winding down, which means we've been doing this a long time. And like any old show, we occasionally recycle story lines.

On Wednesday, it was the one about the last-minute cancellation that would have ruined the game if not for a timely text from a friend. Fortunately, rising star Cori Neslund was able to talk Bennett Kalsevic into driving out to the Red Lion in Lincoln Square to learn a game called Diplomacy. 

By 7:30 p.m., Game 392 was finally under way.  The players quickly made up for lost time. There was a brawl in the Western Mediterranean; an Austrian fleet build in 1901; R/T conflict; a Western Triple; the demise of the league leader; and, eventually, some impressive dot-jockeying in the final year of the game. Time was called after the Fall 1905 turn. The final center counts were:

You'll find our first reference to the classic war movie Platoon in the write-up for Game No. 124, played way back in January 2011. We've used it quite a bit since then because many of our bar games play out the same way: New player shows up, ends up in France or Turkey adjacent to a couple of regulars who--for personal or club-cultural reasons--try really hard to work with him or her. The dynamic casts the new player in the role of Charlie Sheen's Chris Taylor as Sergeants Barnes and Elias battle for his soul. 

Wednesday night at the Red Lion in Lincoln Square, the understudy for Charles Sheen was Gu Qiu, who found us on Meetup. He drew France. His closest neighbors? Two-thirds of the soloists at last month's Weasel Moot, Cori Neslund in England and Jake Trotta in Germany. Readers will decide for themselves who was Elias and who, Barnes. Much like the movie, though, in the end, neither won the game.

Instead, it was Carlos Trevino in Turkey, playing his first league game in more than 2 1/2 years, riding an on-again-off-again alliance with Brandon Fogel's Austria to the board-top. The game ended by time limit after the Fall 1905 turn in the following center counts: